and buy the halogen lamp she wanted for the family room. She had been down-to-earth and handsome and comradely, the kind of person Nora instinctively thought of as a fellow traveler. Her first impulse was to defend this terrific woman to the two self-centered idiots in front of her, but what had they done besides call her that woman from Michaelman’s? Her second impulse, almost simultaneous with the first, was to panic about whether or not she had locked the back door on her way to the car.
Then Nora had seen the bloody corpse of the terrific woman from the lamp store. This figure instantly mutated into that of a boy soldier on a gurney, his belly blown open and his life slipping out through his astonished eyes. Her knees turned to water, and she dropped her head, breathing hard until the twenty-somethings had moved away from the register.
The dying young man and others like him inhabited her better nightmares. The worse ones were much worse.
3
NORA DISMISSED THE nightmare, decidedly of the worse variety, and got out of bed. Because she wanted to look more in control of herself than Davey was likely to be, she rubbed her hands over her forehead and wiped her palms on her nightgown. Out in the hallway, the music no longer sounded like a string quartet. It had a wilder, more chaotic edge” Davey had put on one of the Mahler symphonies he had taught her to enjoy.
Nobody who did not enjoy classical music could stay married to Davey Chancel, who fled into music when troubled. Nora, the pride of the Curlews, had decided to marry Davey during his second proposal, six months after they met, one year after Springfield and her never-to-be-thought-of reunion with Dan Harwich.
Nora padded past a case filled with Chancel House books and reached the stairs to the front door. Beside it, the red light glowed reassuringly above the keypad of the security system. Nora went quietly down the stairs and checked that the door was still locked. When she started down the second set of stairs to the family room, the music came into focus. Indistinct voices sounded. She had been hearing a soundtrack. Davey, who never watched anything except the news, had turned on the television. She went down the last of the stairs, her sympathy hardening into anger. Again, Alden had again publicly humiliated his son.
She opened the family room door and leaned in. Startled but in no obvious distress, wide-eyed Davey stared at her, wearing a lightweight robe of Thai silk over his pajamas and holding a pencil upright over an open notebook. The surprise in his face echoed her own. “Oh, honey,” he said, “did I wake you up?”
“Are you all right?” Nora padded into the room and glanced at the screen. A ragged old man waved a staff in front of a cave. Pippin! Remember to be brave! You must be brave!
Davey aimed the remote control at the set, and the soundtrack disappeared. “I didn’t think you’d hear, I’m sorry.” As neat as a cat in the even light of the halogen lamp, he placed the remote on top of the notebook and looked at her with what seemed like real remorse. “Today we ran into a problem, some nuisance Dad asked me to handle, and I thought I should watch this thing.”
“It wasn’t the TV. I woke up.”
He tilted his head. “Like last night?” The question may not have been perfectly sympathetic.
“This business about Natalie—you know . . .” Nora cut herself off with a wave of a hand. “All the hags in Westerholm have trouble sleeping these days.” She turned back to the television. A bedraggled boy of eight or nine shouldered a sack through a dripping swamp. Twisted, monstrous trees led into gleaming haze.
“And most of them have no more to worry about than you do.”
Last night Davey had listed the reasons why Nora should not worry: she did not live alone or run a business” she did not open the door to strangers. If anyone suspicious turned up, she could push the panic button above the keypad. And, though this remained tactfully unstated, wasn’t she overreacting, letting the old problems get to her all over again?
“I wondered where you were,” she said.
“Well, now you know.” He tapped his pencil against the notebook and managed to smile. Faced with a choice, he chose kindness. “You could watch this with me.”
She sat beside him on the sofa. Davey patted her knee and